Saturday, 22 December 2012

PHILIP ROTH'S INDIGNATION

I have been haunted by
Philip Roth's 2008 novel Indignation since I finally read it a week ago, turning
it over and over in my head, as if to replay and perhaps restage some
of its conflicts, as if to acknowledge just how closely it taps into
my own apprehensions of the world as it was shown to me in my youth,
and as if to marvel again at the way Roth can render all this
relevant to a world which his protagonist, Marcus Messner, would
never have been able to comprehend.

As a coming of age
story, Roth treads the familiar ground of Newark, set out in many of
the amazing novels of his late renaissance, but he also looks back,
clearly, with Marcus' relationship with his father, a kosher butcher,
to Portnoy's Complaint, and in his infatuation with Olivia Hutton,
the damaged WASPy girl he meets at Winesburg College to his novella
Goodbye Columbus, which was, I still believe, the outstanding work of
his early years. In that story, there is a world that is unapproachable, one that lives by different rules, or pretends too, and Neil Klugman cannot react with enough indignation, or knows the danger of so doing. In the present novel, allowing for that possibility, makes Indignation much more, it is a novel of eros and thanatos, sex
and death, something growing out of the Fiedlerian mainstream of Freudian
American post-war fiction whose crest Roth initially rode. But it's also more than that—it's a
transformation of the personal into a fable worthy of the best of
Hawthorne, but one that encapsulates the whole period of Roth's own
life, the latter half of the 20th Century,

Indignation is set in
the era into which I was born—the Korean War is in progress, the
draft looms over the shoulders of the non-deferred, and Marcus'
father, as he graduates from high school and from his post as his
father's aide in the butcher's shop, is growing more and more
obsessive about protecting his son—not just from that war, but from
the changes in American society brought on by the just-completed war,
by the growing prosperity, and the freedoms it brings with it. Marcus
is a 'good' boy—hard-working in the family business and at school,
respectful, even a moderately good second-baseman on the baseball
team. He heads off to Robert Treat College, in Newark, where he finds
himself challenged and finds some of his horizons growing—but the
spectre of his father's control leads him to transfer to Winesburg, a
Lutheran college in Ohio, where he is very much the outsider
(remember Roth at Bucknell). He works as a waiter, he feuds with his
roommates, then with his next roommate, he studies, and eventually he
falls for a girl.

Who gives him a blow
job on their first date. This behaviour is incomprehensible to
Marcus, he is a 'good' boy and this is something 'good' girls do not
do. Trying to comprehend it—is it because her parents are divorced?
Because she has suicide scars on her wrists?--throws Marcus for a
loop, a first step toward a crumbling of the world as he understands
it. This process is reinforced by the attentions of the Dean, with
whom Marcus winds up debating and arguing over his own lack of
involvement in the school's social life (something that is de facto
limited by his being Jewish), and by his requirement to attend
chapel—to which he objects not because he is Jewish but because he
considers himself an atheist. For the first time, Marcus finds
himself rebelling, almost instinctively, and certainly beyond his
control.

He winds up ill, in the
hospital, where his relationship with Olivia is rekindled and then
lost after his mother arrives, with the revelation that she intends
to divorce his father. A barter is made, lives seem ruined, the
campus explodes in a snowball fight, and Marcus winds up being
expelled, and exposed to the draft. And the story, we have learned,
is being narrated from the afterlife, because Marcus was killed in
Korea shortly before the cessation of hostilities.

There is a lot of plot
synopsis above, but I honestly find it hard to explain why this novel
is so powerful without setting out the story. What makes it linger is
the honest befuddlement of Marcus (names, as ever, are important to
Roth--'mess' ner, Winesburg with its association with Sherwood
Anderson, Robert Treat, the Puritan from my home town in Connecticut, and so on) and the way he is let down by the expectations
of both his Jewish upbringing and of 'mainstream' America, how those
combine to create a lethal cocktail, and it is enough to raise
Roth's, and our, indignation. As I said, it's a book about America,
but it's also about the direct link between sex and death, being
narrated after that death. In that sense, I think the British cover
(above) and the US cover (right) needed to be amalgamated for a more
telling effect.

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